Monday Mule Pack – February 20, 2017
February 20, 2017
A weekly look at some of the more interesting articles from around the web.
This week’s Mule Pack is a bit longer than normal. If there’s one good thing that’s come out of the
Trump presidency so far, it’s the quality of journalism and thought that it has spawned.
No society, not even one as rich and fortunate as the United States has been, is guaranteed a successful future. When early Americans wrote things like “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” they did not do so to provide bromides for future bumper stickers. They lived in a world in which authoritarian rule was the norm, in which rulers habitually claimed the powers and assets of the state as their own personal property.
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“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” With those words, written more than 200 years ago, the authors of the Federalist Papers explained the most important safeguard of the American constitutional system. They then added this promise: “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.” Congress enacts laws, appropriates funds, confirms the president’s appointees. Congress can subpoena records, question officials, and even impeach them. Congress can protect the American system from an overbearing president.
But will it?
As politics has become polarized, Congress has increasingly become a check only on presidents of the opposite party. Recent presidents enjoying a same-party majority in Congress—Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, George W. Bush from 2003 through 2006—usually got their way. And congressional oversight might well be performed even less diligently during the Trump administration.
“We’re backed into a corner,” said Mr. Medford, 46, whose business teaches people to be filmmakers. “There are at least some things about Trump I find to be defensible. But they are saying: ‘Agree with us 100 percent or you are morally bankrupt. You’re an idiot if you support any part of Trump.’ ”
How America counts its homeless – and why so many are overlooked
At the time, some activists opposed the idea of counting homeless people, arguing that doing so would inevitably produce an inaccurately low number, enabling policymakers to cut back on services. In 1990, homelessness advocates dumped sand outside the US Department of Commerce and placed signs reading, “Counting the homeless is like counting grains of sand.”
Despite criticisms, the outdoor counts prevailed and gradually became an enduring event taking place in the last 10 days of January across the country every other year.
Judges v. Trump: Be Careful What You Wish For
Donald Trump is suddenly looking like a very weak autocrat
This has become a pattern, in which Trump deals with setbacks by lashing out at other institutions, including ones that can function as a check on his power. When the courts blocked his immigration ban, he blasted both the courts and the news media for making us less safe, in what seemed to be designed to lay the groundwork to blame them for a future terrorist attack, a move that even some Republicans criticized for its authoritarian tendencies. This appeared to be a test run of sorts, in which Trump was experimenting with how far he could go in delegitimizing the institutions that might act as a check on his power later.
But as a test run, for now, at least, it is failing. Trump’s unchecked antics on multiple fronts are suddenly making him look like a very weak autocrat wannabe.
Why do smart people in the White House do stupid things? Because Trump tells them to.
In Flynn’s case, if he were freelancing with the Russians, Trump would justifiably be furious about the embarrassment and distraction it has caused. Trump never hesitates to attack those he thinks have wronged him. But the day after Flynn’s calls to the ambassador, Russia made an unusual decision: It would not take the usual course of retaliating against the Obama administration’s sanctions. And Trump tweeted his pleasure: “Great move on delay (by V. Putin) — I always knew he was very smart!”
Since then, Trump has uttered nary a word of criticism of Flynn. On Wednesday, he called Flynn “a wonderful man” who has “been treated very, very unfairly by the media.”
‘That’s how dictators get started’: McCain criticizes Trump for calling media ‘the enemy’
Such talk, McCain (R-Ariz.) said on NBC News in an interview set to air Sunday, was “how dictators get started.”
“In other words, a consolidation of power,” McCain told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd from Munich. “When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press. And I’m not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I’m just saying we need to learn the lessons of history.”
When Canadian Scientists Were Muzzled by Their Government
Just as the American science community is now struggling with whether to speak out and march or stay quiet and do its work, Canadian scientists wrestled with the same questions. Ultimately, Canada’s scientific community came together to save our research, galvanized support to fight back, and captured the attention and concern of the public. I hope our experience — in the spirit of science transcending borders — can be instructive.
Fearing the continued erosion of even the most basic protections for food inspection, water quality and human health, Canadian scientists filled Ottawa’s streets in the Death of Evidence march. That theatrical mock funeral procession became something of a cultural touchstone. It was a turning point that galvanized public opinion against Prime Minister Harper’s anti-science agenda. By the next election, Justin Trudeau’s center-left government swept in on a platform that put scientists’ right to speak and the promise of evidence-based decisions alongside job creation and economic growth.
So here’s our advice as the Trump administration gears up. Spotlight and champion scientists’ refusal to kowtow to intimidation. I’m encouraged by what has already emerged: When Mr. Trump’s transition team circulated a questionnaire intended to identify staff members who had worked on climate change policies under President Obama, Department of Energy employees refused to release their names. When National Park Service employees were prevented from sharing information on social media, they created alternative Twitter accounts overnight and tweeted the truth about climate change and pollution from dusk to dawn.
Tiny Trump Photos Could Annoy The President Bigly
As the name suggests, Tiny Trumps features photoshopped pics of the president where not only his hands are small, but every other body part.
The photos make the president look even more childish than his behavior already suggests.
Watch how the measles outbreak spreads when kids get vaccinated – and when they don’t
Part of the problem, according to Dr Elizabeth Edwards, professor of pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program, is just that: vaccination is understood by many as an individual choice, when science makes clear that the choice – to vaccinate or not to vaccinate – can affect an entire community.
“When you immunize your child, you’re not only immunizing your child. That child’s immunization is contributing to the control of the disease in the population,” Edwards explained.
Scientists have just detected a major change to the Earth’s oceans linked to a warming climate
Ocean oxygen is vital to marine organisms, but also very delicate — unlike in the atmosphere, where gases mix together thoroughly, in the ocean that is far harder to accomplish, Schmidtko explained. Moreover, he added, just 1 percent of all the Earth’s available oxygen mixes into the ocean; the vast majority remains in the air.
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Because oxygen in the global ocean is not evenly distributed, the 2 percent overall decline means there is a much larger decline in some areas of the ocean than others.
Moreover, the ocean already contains so-called oxygen minimum zones, generally found in the middle depths. The great fear is that their expansion upward, into habitats where fish and other organism thrive, will reduce the available habitat for marine organisms.
In shallower waters, meanwhile, the development of ocean “hypoxic” areas, or so-called “dead zones,” may also be influenced in part by declining oxygen content overall.
On top of all of that, declining ocean oxygen can also worsen global warming in a feedback loop. In or near low oxygen areas of the oceans, microorganisms tend to produce nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas, Gilbert writes. Thus the new study “implies that production rates and efflux to the atmosphere of nitrous oxide … will probably have increased.”
The new study underscores once again that some of the most profound consequences of climate change are occurring in the oceans, rather than on land.
Doubts grow that GOP can repeal Obamacare
Undoing the health care law despised by conservatives seemed to be a straightforward proposition for the party after it won the White House and retained control of both chambers of Congress. Instead, Republicans are sniping over how much of the law to scrap, what to replace it with and when. At this moment, it’s far from a sure thing any plan could get through Congress.
Trump undertakes most ambitious regulatory rollback since Reagan
The campaign has alarmed labor unions, public safety advocates and environmental activists, who fear losing regulations that have been in place for years, along with relatively new federal mandates. Business groups, however, are thrilled, saying Trump is responding to long-standing complaints that a profusion of federal regulations unnecessarily increases costs and hampers their ability to create jobs.
What a Failed Trump Administration Looks Like
President Trump can push all the pretty buttons on the command deck of the Starship Enterprise, but don’t expect anything to actually happen, because they are not attached.
The UAE’s latest venture may set new heights in terms of ambition, however. On Tuesday, at the sidelines of the World Government Summit in Dubai, the UAE announced that it was planning to build the first city on Mars by 2117. According to CNBC, UAE engineers presented a concept city at the event about the size of Chicago for guests to explore.
Stephen Colbert’s anti-Trump experiment is starting to work
“Listen, if you don’t show up, I’m going to call you a liar,” Colbert said. “And if you do show up, I’m going to call you a liar to your face.”
With forceful remarks like this, Colbert has been gaining on late-night king Jimmy Fallon, who is far less inclined to take on the president in a harsh manner.
Maybe because it seems such an unlikely thing for Lincoln to say, people quickly pointed out that there’s no evidence that he ever did, and that the genesis of the quotation perhaps was a 1947 advertisement for a book about aging by one Edward J. Stieglitz.
But this Flynn episode suggests that facts and reality do matter. The Trump White House is not invulnerable to them. A dogged and determined press corps can indeed ferret them out, notwithstanding the White House’s efforts to render them meaningless and irrelevant — or indeed to make them disappear.
What we know only makes what we don’t know feel all the more ominous. But I believe that facts are forthcoming. Reporters are digging like a crew of coal miners hopped up on a case of Red Bull, and sources in Washington are leaking to anyone with a press credential.
Drip, drip, drip it goes until the dam breaks and the truth spills.
All told, there are more than 1,200 dams in Tennessee, including 273 rated as “high hazard” because their failure likely would lead to the loss of life. But nearly half of the state’s dams, including 69 rated as high hazard, are exempt from regulation and government inspections because they’re classified as farm ponds.
So why is it that people with a Y chromosome aren’t as sensitive to aromas as their XX counterparts? Nobody seems to know for sure, but scientists have posited a number of theories, mostly related to reproduction: It might have been important for women to detect contaminated food before their babies eat it, or women may have needed to be able to recognize their babies by scent.
